number 34 • Winter 2018

Authors

Fred Baumann

articles

LIBERALISM began as an attack on traditional communities. Abstracting from all the lived differences that mattered to those communities, like religion, breeding, caste, and trade, and replacing them with the universal right to liberty to protect one’s life and pursue one’s own version of happiness, its natural tendency has always been "libertarian." Of course, it had to accept some elements of communal continuity; it taught the social contract, not anarchy. Thus liberalism has always contained its own more communitarian wing while inciting nonliberal communitarian dissenters.

TREE decades after the Vietnam War, American politicians are still making foreign policy decisions in its shadow. In fact, on one level, debates such as those over the recent war in Iraq can be viewed as hinging on how one interprets the American experience in Vietnam. Was that war merely a case of overreach or was it the typical case—that is, was it what happens whenever the United States undertakes military interventions more dangerous and open-ended than, say, Grenada?

IN HIS LATEST BOOK, The Lost Soul of American Politics, John Diggins tries to explain why our political culture has been dominated by liberalism, why this has led many intellectuals to be alienated from politics, and above all, why American politics seems to have lost its moral vision since the death of Lincoln. Although this is a book on politics, his answers all have to do with religion, in particular with Calvinism. Diggins believes that liberal individualism “seemed to leave America without a sense of moral community,” and that liberal pluralism—the licensed competition of self-interested groups—left her “without a sense of national purpose.” But he is also aware of recent writers who wrongly try to deny America’s liberal heritage altogether. Thus his project is simultaneously to reassert America’s liberal traditions while showing that liberalism itself has had roots in a morally serious Calvinism that, fully developed in Lincoln, became “the conscience of liberalism.”